ON THE NORTHWEST, 92421 OR VALLEY OF THE UPPER MISSISIPPI. COMPRISING THE COUNTRY BETWEEN LAKES SUPERIOR AND MICHIGAN, EAST; THE 10,784 ENTERED according to Act of Congress, in the year 1846, by WILEY AND PUTNAM, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court for the Southern District of New York. R. CRAIGHEAD'S Power Press' 112 Fulton Street. INTRODUCTION. THE present work covers, in part, new ground geographically-and differs in design, plan, and mode of treatment, from those that have before appeared descriptive of some portions of the district of which it treats. Though for more than a century and a half known to the French Missionaries, the voyageurs, and the coureurs des bois, and to those few who went out as discoverers and explorers, yet it was almost wholly an unknown region to our American geographers only twenty years since. Mr. Darby, in his Gazetteer date 1827, says that much of the portion. west of the Missisippi is unknown. Most of the books that have been published in relation to this country, have been designed only for guides to travellers. and emigrants;—and have consequently been subject, so far as the general reader has been concerned, to the twofold. objection that they were too much in detail to be of interest to them, or to embody that kind of information, in that shape, that would be valuable ;—and also that by the rapid transitions constantly in progress in this part of the country, they very soon became antiquated and not to be confided in |